Many large businesses rely on enterprise resource planning computing architectures and systems to electronically manage and coordinate business resources, information, and functions. In large organizations these computing architectures may be made up of hundreds of systems, distributed across various entities making up the organization. For example, a global business may rely on location-specific logistics systems to process orders in different localities, division specific supply chain management systems to manage supply chains across geographies, and business specific accounting systems to manage financial transactions at a business level.
Some organizations may also use marketing systems to coordinate and manage multiple marketing activities, campaigns, and promotions. Because organizations may have hundreds or even thousands different marketing activities, campaigns, and promotions depending on different events, clientele, dates, and location, such as Mother's Day, Back to School, Superbowl, and FIFA Soccer World Cup, keeping track of these events can be complex. While existing systems include searching features enabling a user to find particular marketing campaign information based on matching data in a marketing database, these systems require a prior knowledge of certain details of a particular marketing campaign in order to retrieve pertinent data through the searching features.
FIG. 1 shows an existing search form for marketing related information. In this existing search form, a user selects one or more data fields 110 to search, such as Marketing Project ID, Marketing Project, Employee Responsible ID, or Planned Start Date. A user then selects a criteria 120 for comparing the selected data field 110 with corresponding data entered by the user in the value field 130. Thus, in order for a user to retrieve data relating to a particular marketing project, a user must enter at least some information identifying the particular marketing project. Moreover, complex searches limited to a subset of products, times, and projects, can be cumbersome, time consuming, and confusing for users to manually enter using the provided data fields 110, criteria 120, and value fields 130.
Once the search has been completed, other issues arise relating to presenting the results to a user. Marketing activities, campaigns, and promotions involve several phases occurring before, during, and after the campaign. For example, before the campaign marketing materials, such as advertisements and coupons may prepared, during the campaign inventory may be re-stocked, and after the campaign retailers may be reimbursed for coupon redemptions. While some users may be interested in reviewing information relating to various phases of a marketing campaign, in some instances this information is unnecessary and distracting, in that it occupies spaces and clutters the screen or output. Furthermore, this additional information also requires additional processing resources leading to longer processing times and slower performance.
There is thus a need for more efficient marketing project search tools to quickly search multiple search fields without a priori knowledge of the exact search parameters and there is a need for more efficient search result presentment tools to enable the quick display of pertinent search result information.